Lenox Hill is a neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It forms the lower section of the Upper East Side, closest to Midtown. The neighborhood ranges from East 60th Street to East 77th Street south to north, by East River to the east, and by Park Avenue to the west. A significant portion of the neighborhood lies within the Upper East Side Historic District designated by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2013 and expanded in 2010. The neighborhood is part of Manhattan Community Board 8.
HISTORY
The neighborhood is named for the hill that “stood at what became 70th Street and Park Avenue.” The name “Lenox” is that of the immigrant Scottish merchant Robert Lenox (1759-1839), who owned about 30 acres (120,000 m2) of land “at the five-mile (8 km) stone”, reaching from 5th Avenue to 4th Avenue and from East 74th Street to 68th Street. For the sum of $6,420 ($99,000 in current dollar terms) or $6,920 ($107,000) he had purchased a first set of three parcels in 1818, at an auction held at the Tontine Coffee House of mortgaged premises of Archibald Gracie, in order to protect Gracie’s heirs from foreclosure, as he was executor of Gracie’s estate. Several months later he purchased three further parcels, extending his property north to 74th Street. “Thereafter these two tracts were known as the ‘Lenox Farm'” The tenant farmhouse stood on the rise of ground between Fifth and Madison avenues and 70th and 71st Streets, which would have been the hill, if the property had ever been called “Lenox Hill.” The railroad right-of-way of theNew York & Harlem Railroad passed along the east boundary of the property.
Robert Lenox’s son James Lenox divided most of the farm into blocks of building lots and sold them during the 1860s and ’70s; he also donated land for the Union Theological Seminary along the railroad right-of-way, between 69th and 70th Streets, and just north of it a full square block between Madison and Fourth Avenue, 70th and 71st streets, for the Presbyterian Hospital, which occupied seven somewhat austere structures on the plot; He built the Lenox Library on a full block-front of Fifth Avenue, now the site of the Frick Collection.
Lenox Hill Hospital, the former German Hospital, is located in this area, on East 77th Street.
